"A simple idea beautifully realised. The pictures are faultless in execution, the design is elegant and appropriate, and David Chandler’s essay is eloquent and thought-provoking. For a first book this is a triumph. Now for the difficult second album…!"Mark Power

…An overall sense of loss pervades the work of brother and sister Beth and Thom Atkinson in their new book, Missing Buildings which, as the name suggests, is a typological study of the bombed-out spaces left in London from the second world war.

This impression is reinforced by the lonely streets, the unpeopled pavements and flat, empty skies. It’s as if the air raid sirens never stopped. As if the living have sought shelter below ground alongside the dead and other archaeological remains. An eerie calmpervades throughout…

The photographs in Missing Buildings, revealing temporally distant traces of London, are situated poignantly on an axis of photographic history and physical geography. They are the most appropriate response to the subject matter there could be, in their modernity, purpose and melancholy...

...Missing Buildings becomes a remarkable invitation to look again through a glass plate, for only through photography can we share this view, and what Thom and Beth Atkinson have found belongs to us all.

Thom and Beth Atkinson’s images are neither romantic nor photojournalistic, but altogether more sombre, especially in their absence of people. Cumulatively, they suggest not just the inexorable passing of time, but the odd sense that these gaps in the cityscape are frozen in time… These shots are a resolutely low-key, and an ineffably sad, counterpoint to official memorials… Their shots reveal London as a spectral memorial, frozen in time.

These missing buildings are the memento mori of the city. They are a reminder to us all that while order is illusory, life is short, and our own time will come, the city does not readily forget it’s own.